The present invention relates to cartons and more particularly to a stackable carton particularly suitable for holding perishable commodities.
Growers of fruits and vegetables have traditionally used wooden boxes for storage and shipment of their products. Wooden boxes can be readily packed either in the field or at packing sheds and stand up well during short term or long term storage. Moreover, such boxes can be easily palletized and shipped.
Wooden boxes do, however, have the disadvantage that they are somewhat expensive to make both because of the cost of raw materials and because of the labor costs which must be incurred in making such boxes. Moreover, wooden boxes must be manufactured in their erected form and shipped fully erected to the grower before they are ever put into use. Since the boxes are bulky even when empty, the costs of shipping them to the user in quantity are not insignificant.
Paper materials, such as corrugated, are less expensive than wood and can be readily formed into erected cartons which can be shipped to a user in a collapsed condition to save freight costs. However, corrugated cartons have not been widely accepted by growers of fruit and vegetables because of concerns that such cartons may be more easily degraded by moisture than wooden boxes and because it is thought that cardboard cartons do not stack as well as wooden boxes of the same size.